Electronic mail, commonly known as e-mail, has become a very popular method of communicating. The ease and efficiency by which e-mail can be sent and received while still providing for a written document has revolutionized the method of communicating, as well as had an enormous impact on how society interacts socially. The pervasiveness of e-mail communications has also engendered the development of businesses whose sole function is to provide the infrastructure necessary to facilitate the billions of e-mail generated daily.
The sheer numbers of computer users, coupled with the fact that nearly every computer user has at least one, and regularly many, e-mail addresses, has also created a fertile source of advertising. Many business entities have developed ways to send e-mail to literally millions of e-mail addresses substantially simultaneously. These e-mails are typically unsolicited by the owners of the e-mail addresses to whom they are sent and are almost universally regarded as nuisances to not only the recipients of the messages, but also to the Internet service providers (ISP)s who must provide the storage capacity and transmission bandwidth to facilitate these voluminous communications. Moreover, recipients of these e-mails must expend valuable time downloading these messages only to subsequently delete them so as not to waste local machine or network resources. This time can be significant as many alternate methods of receiving e-mail, such as through telephones lines and personal digital assistants (PDA)s, have very limited memory and processing capabilities.
The negative effects of unsolicited mass e-mail are summarized below. First, unsolicited mass e-mail requires a large amount of bandwidth to be allocated to the delivery, which ultimately slows down the delivery of desired content, whether that content be web pages or legitimate e-mails. Second, these mass e-mailing techniques can often contain inappropriate content for some viewers. Finally, it is not unusual for e-mail based computer viruses to be attached to these mass e-mails, causing devastating effects to computer terminals and networks. Thus, it is highly desirable to be able to identify and delete these mass unsolicited e-mails before they are delivered to a user's computer.
There have been multiple attempts to address this problem in the past, some of which have been marginally successful in combating SPAM types of e-mail. First, some unsolicited e-mails are consistently sent by known entities. The names of these entities are placed onto a blacklist and any e-mail which is sent by these entities can be automatically deleted from a post office server, thus never reaching the e-mail client. Second, some unsolicited mass e-mails are identifiable by the content of the message. For example, if the sender of the e-mail is different from the sender field in the header of the e-mail message, it can be identified as spam and accordingly deleted from the post office server. Finally, weighted key phrases within the text of e-mail messages can be identified, (for example, those having adult oriented words or advertising lingo) and those messages containing these phrases can be identified as spam and deleted from the post office server. All of these methods serve to prohibit some e-mail messages from being delivered to an e-mail client, however, all of these methods have some discrepancies as those entities sending unsolicited mass e-mails are constantly devising new methods of overcoming the identification mechanisms.
With regard to the blacklisting method of e-mail blocking, only those e-mails being generated from a known source can be blocked. This method is easily overcome by simply changing the name of the sender, or establishing new domain name servers to generate these messages. Furthermore, this method does nothing to protect e-mail recipients from the countless spam generators who may not have been identified. The other two methods of spam blocking, i.e. recognizing certain attributes within an e-mail that signal that it is spam, or red flagging certain keywords within the text of e-mails, are easily overcome by simply generating e-mails that avoid these identification techniques.
Therefore, what is needed is a method and apparatus for the real time identification and removal of unsolicited mass e-mails which cannot be overcome by the simple aversion techniques.